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### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: Consider
the
Lobster
and Other
Essays |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: A l s o b y Dav i d F o s t e r Wa l l ac e
Th e B r o o m o f t h e S y s t e m
Girl with Curious Hair
Infinite Jest
A S u p p o s e d ly F u n Th i n g I ’ l l N e v e r D o A g a i n
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
E v e ry t h i n g a n d M o r e
Oblivion |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: Consider
the
Lobster
and Other
Essays
David Foster Wallace |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: L i t t l e , B r o w n a n d C o m pa n y
N e w Yo r k |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: Boston |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: Copyright © 2006 by David Foster Wallace
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any
electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who
may quote brief passages in a review.
Little, Brown and Company
Time Warner Book Group
1271 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
Visit our Web site at www.twbookmark.com
First eBook Edition: December 2005
ISBN: 0-7595-1183 |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: -7
The following pieces were originally published in edited, heavily edited, or (in at
least one instance) bowdlerized form in the following books and periodicals. N.B.:
In those cases where the fact that the author was writing for a particular organ is
important to the essay itself — i.e., where the commissioning magazine’s name
keeps popping up in ways that can’t now be changed without screwing up the whole
piece — the entry is marked with an asterisk. A single case in which the essay was
written to be de |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: livered as a speech, plus another one where the original article
appeared bipseudonymously and now for odd and hard-to-explain reasons doesn’t
quite work if the “we” and “your correspondents” thing gets singularized, are further tagged with what I think are called daggers. To wit:
*†“Big Red Son” in Premiere.
“Certainly the End of Something or Other, One Would Sort of Have to Think” in the
New York Observer and The Anchor Essay Annual: The Best of 1998.
†“Some Remarks on Kafka’s Funniness from Which Probabl |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: y Not Enough Has Been
Removed” and *“Authority and American Usage” in Harper’s.
“The View from Mrs. Thompson’s” and *“Up, Simba” in Rolling Stone.
“How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart” in the Philadelphia Enquirer.
*“Consider the Lobster” in Gourmet and The Best American Essays 2005.
“Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky” in the Village Voice Literary Supplement.
* (at least a tiny bit) “Host” in the Atlantic Monthly. |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: for Bonnie Nadell |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: Contents |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: Big Red Son 3
Certainly the End of Something or Other,
One Would Sort of Have to Think 51
Some Remarks on Kafka’s Funniness from Which Probably
Not Enough Has Been Removed 60
Authority and American Usage 66
The View from Mrs. Thompson’s 128
How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart 141
Up, Simba 156
Consider the Lobster 235
Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky 255
Host 275 |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: Consider
the
Lobster
and Other
Essays |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: BIG RED SON |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: Th e A m e r i c a n A c a d e m y of Emergency Medicine confirms it:
Each year, between one and two dozen adult US males are admitted
to ERs after having castrated themselves. With kitchen tools, usually,
sometimes wire cutters. In answer to the obvious question, surviving
patients most often report that their sexual urges had become a
source of intolerable conflict and anxiety. The desire for perfect
release and the real-world impossibility of perfect, whenever-youwant-it release had together produced a t |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: ension they could no
longer stand.
It is to the 30+ testosteronically afflicted males whose cases
have been documented in the past two years that your correspondents wish to dedicate this article. And to those tormented souls
considering autocastration in 1998, we wish to say: “Stop! Stay your
hand! Hold off with those kitchen utensils and/or wire cutters!”
Because we believe we may have found an alternative.
Every spring, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
presents awards for outstanding achie |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: vement in all aspects of main- |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: 3 |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: D AV I D F O S T E R WA L L A C E |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: stream cinema. These are the Academy Awards. Mainstream cinema
is a major industry in the United States, and so are the Academy
Awards. The AAs’ notorious commercialism and hypocrisy disgust
many of the millions and millions and millions of viewers who tune
in during prime time to watch the presentations. It is not a coincidence that the Oscars ceremony is held during TV’s Sweeps Week.
We pretty much all tune in, despite the grotesquerie of watching an
industry congratulate itself on its pretense that it’s |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: still an art form,
of hearing people in $5,000 gowns invoke lush clichés of surprise
and humility scripted by publicists, etc. — the whole cynical postmodern deal — but we all still seem to watch. To care. Even though
the hypocrisy hurts, even though opening grosses and marketing
strategies are now bigger news than the movies themselves, even
though Cannes and Sundance have become nothing more than
enterprise zones. But the truth is that there’s no more real joy about
it all anymore. Worse, there seems to b |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: e this enormous unspoken
conspiracy where we all pretend that there’s still joy. That we think
it’s funny when Bob Dole does a Visa ad and Gorbachev shills for
Pizza Hut. That the whole mainstream celebrity culture is rushing to
cash in and all the while congratulating itself on pretending not to
cash in. Underneath it all, though, we know the whole thing sucks.
Your correspondents humbly offer an alternative.
Every January, the least pretentious city in America hosts the Annual
AVN Awards. The AVN stands f |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: or Adult Video News, which is sort of
the Variety of the US porn industry. This thick, beautifully designed
magazine costs $7.95 per issue, is about 80 percent ads, and is clearly
targeted at adult-video retailers. Its circulation is appr. 40,000.
Though the sub-line vagaries of entertainment accounting are
legendary, it is universally acknowledged that the US adult-film
industry, at $3.5–4 billion in annual sales, rentals, cable charges,
and video-masturbation-booth revenues, is an even larger and
more eff |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: icient moneymaking machine than legitimate mainstream
American cinema (the latter’s annual gross commonly estimated at |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: 4 |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: BIG RED SON |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: $2–2.5 billion). The US adult industry is centered in LA’s San Fernando Valley, just over the mountains from Hollywood.1 Some
insiders like to refer to the adult industry as Hollywood’s Evil Twin,
others as the mainstream’s Big Red Son.
It is no accident that Adult Video News — a slick, expensive periodical whose articles are really more like infomercials — and its yearly
Awards both came into being in 1982. The early ’80s, after all, saw
the genesis of VCRs and home-video rentals, which have done for
the a |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: dult industry pretty much what TV did for pro football.
From the 12/11/97 press release issued by AVN (visitable also at
www.avn.com):
• The nominations for the 15th Annual AVN Awards were announced
today.2 This year’s awards show, commemorating AVN’s 15th anniversary, celebrates “History”. [sic]
• Awards will be presented in a record 106 categories over a two
night period.
• The adult industry released nearly 8,000 adult releases [sic] in
1997, including over 4,000 “new” releases (non-compilation). AVN
rev |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: iewed every new release in every categroy [sic] this past year,
logging over 30,000 sex scenes.3 |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: 1 One porn production company, Caballero Home Video, has its headquarters in a big |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: Van Nuys duplex whose other half is the soundstage for Beverly Hills 90210.
2 The passive mood here’s a bit disingenuous — the release itself is announcing them.
3 At, say, an average of 90 minutes per movie, this means that some person or persons put |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: in 1.4 years of nonstop continuous porn-viewing. Hence your correspondents’ alternative for US males so tortured by carnal desire that they are tempted to autoneuter: Volunteer as a judge for the AVN Awards and spend 1.4 years gazing without rest at the latest in
adult video. We guarantee that you will never thereafter want to see, hear, engage in, or
even think about human sexuality ever again. Trust us on this. All five marginal (and
male) print journalists assigned to cover the 1998 AVN Awards concur: Ev |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: en just watching the dozen or so “big” or “high-profile” adult releases of the past year — Bad Wives,
Zazel, A Week and a Half in the Life of a Prostitute, Miscreants, New Wave Hookers 5, Seduce &
Destroy, Buttman in Barcelona, Gluteus to the Maximus — fried everyone’s glandular circuitboard. By the end of the Awards weekend, none of us were even having normal biological first-thing-in-the-morning or jouncy-bus-ride-between-hotels erections; and when
approached even innocently by members of the opposite sex |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: , we all now recoiled as from
a hot flame (which made our party a kind of strange and challenging breakfast gig,
according to our Sunday-AM waitress). |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: 5 |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: D AV I D F O S T E R WA L L A C E |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: • By comparison, last year there were approximately 375 films eligible for the Academy Awards that these voters [sic — meaning different voters from the AVN voters, presumably] were required to see.
AVN had to watch more than 10 times the amount of releases in
order to develop these nominations [usage and repetition sic,
though 4,000 divided by 375 is indeed over 10]. |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: From the acceptance speech of Mr. Tom Byron, Saturday, 10 January 1998, Caesars Forum ballroom, Caesars Palace Hotel and
Casino complex, Las Vegas NV, upon winning AVN ’s 1998 Male
Performer of the Year Award (and with no little feeling): “I want to
thank every beautiful woman I ever put my cock inside.” [Laughter,
cheers, ovation.]
From the acceptance speech of Ms. Jeanna Fine, ibid., upon
winning AVN ’s 1998 Best Supporting Actress Award for her role in
Rob Black’s Miscreants: “Jesus, which one is this fo |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: r, Miscreants?
Jesus, that’s another one where I read the script and said ‘Oh shit, I
am going to go to hell. [Laughter, cheers.] But that’s okay, ’cause
all my friends’ ll be there too! ” [Huge wave of laughter, cheers,
applause.]
From the inter-Award banter of Mr. Bobby Slayton, professional comedian and master of ceremonies for the 1997 AVNAs: “I
know I’m looking good, though, like younger, ’cause I started
using this special Grecian Formula — every time I find a gray hair, I
fuck my wife in the ass. [No |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: laughter, scattered groans.] Fuck you.
That’s a great joke. Fuck you.”
Bobby Slayton, a gravelly-voiced Dice Clay knockoff who kept
introducing every female performer as “the woman I’m going to
cut my dick off for,” and who astounded all the marginal print journalists in attendance with both his unfunniness and his resemblance to every apartment-complex coke dealer we’d ever met, is
mercifully absent from the 1998 Awards gala. The ’98 emcee is one
Robert Schimmel, alumnus of In Living Color and a Howard St |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: ern
regular. Schimmel looks like a depraved, deeply tan Wallace Shawn
and is no less coarse than B. Slayton but a lot better. He does a pan- |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: 6 |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: BIG RED SON |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: tomime of someone attempting intercourse with a Love Doll he’s
been too lazy to blow up all the way. He contrasts the woeful paucity
of his own ejaculate with the concussive orgasms of certain wellknown male performers,4 comparing these men’s ejaculations to
automatic lawn sprinklers and doing an eerie sonic impression of
same. All of 1998’s marginal print journalists are together at Table
189 at the very back of the ballroom. Most of these reporters are
from the sorts of men’s magazines that sit shrinkwrap |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: ped behind
the cash registers of convenience stores, and they are a worldly and
jaded crew indeed, but Schimmel gets a couple of them — whose
noms de guerre are Harold Hecuba and Dick Filth — laughing so
uproariously that people at the Anabolic Video table nearby keep
looking over in annoyance. At one point during a routine on premature ejaculation, Dick Filth actually chokes on a California roll.
. . . But all this is Saturday night, the main event. And there are
a whole lot of festivities preceding Saturd |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: ay’s climax.
The adult industry is vulgar. Would anyone disagree? One of the
AVN Awards’ categories is “Best Anal Themed Feature”; another is
“Best Overall Marketing Campaign — Company Image.” Irresistible,
a 1983 winner in several categories, has been spelled Irresistable in
Adult Video News for fifteen straight years. The industry’s not only
vulgar, it’s predictably vulgar. All the clichés are true. The typical
porn producer really is the ugly little man with a bad toupee and a
pinkie-ring the size of a R |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: olaids. The typical porn director really is
the guy who uses the word class as a noun to mean refinement. The
typical porn starlet really is the lady in Lycra eveningwear with tattoos all down her arms who’s both smoking and chewing gum while
telling journalists how grateful she is to Wadcutter Productions
Ltd. for footing her breast-enlargement bill. And meaning it. The |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: 4 (Mr. Peter North, in particular, delivers what seem more like mortar rounds than bio- |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: emissions.) |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: 7 |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: D AV I D F O S T E R WA L L A C E |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: whole AVN Awards weekend comprises what Mr. Dick Filth calls an
Irony-Free Zone.
But of course we should keep in mind that vulgar has many dictionary definitions and that only a couple of these have to do w/
lewdness or bad taste. At root, vulgar just means popular on a mass
scale. It is the semantic opposite of pretentious or snobby. It is humility with a comb-over. It is Nielsen ratings and Barnum’s axiom and
the real bottom line. It is big, big business.
Thirty-four-year-old porn actor Cal Jammer killed |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: himself in 1995.
Starlets Shauna Grant, Nancy Kelly, Alex Jordan, and Savannah
have all killed themselves in the last decade. Savannah and Jordan
received AVN’s Best New Starlet awards in 1991 and 1992, respectively. Savannah killed herself after getting mildly disfigured in a
car accident. Alex Jordan is famous for having addressed her suicide note to her pet bird. Crewman and performer Israel Gonzalez
killed himself at a porn company warehouse in 1997.
An LA-based support group called PAW (= Protecting Ad |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: ult
Welfare) runs a 24-hour crisis line for people in the adult industry.
A fundraiser for PAW was held at a Mission Hills CA bowling alley
last November. It was a nude bowling tournament. Dozens of starlets agreed to take part. Two or three hundred adult-video fans
showed up and paid to watch them bowl naked. No production
companies or their executives participated or gave money. The
fundraiser took in $6,000, which is slightly less than two onemillionths of porn’s yearly gross.
As you know if you’ve seen |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: Casino, Showgirls, Bugsy, etc., there are
really three Las Vegases. Binion’s, where the World Series of Poker
is always played, exemplifies the “Old Vegas,” centered around Fremont Street. Las Vegas’s future is even now under late-stage construction at the very end of the Strip, on the outskirts of town
(where US malls always go up); it’s to be a bunch of theme-parkish, |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: 8 |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: BIG RED SON |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: more “family-oriented” venues of the kind that De Niro describes
so plangently at the end of Casino.
But Las Vegas as most of us see it, Vegas qua Vegas, comprises the
dozen or so hotels that flank the Strip’s middle. Vegas Populi: the opulent, intricate, garish, ecstatically decadent hotels, cathedra to gambling, partying, and live entertainment of the most microphoneswinging sort. The Sands. The Sahara. The Stardust. MGM Grand,
Maxim. All within a small radius. Yearly utility expenditures on
neon well int |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: o seven figures. Harrah’s, Casino Royale (with its big
24-hour Denny’s attached), Flamingo Hilton, Imperial Palace. The
Mirage, with its huge laddered waterfall always lit up. Circus Circus.
Treasure Island, with its intricate facade of decks and rigging and
mizzens and vang. The Luxor, shaped like a ziggurat from Babylon
of yore. Barbary Coast, whose sign out front says cash your paycheck — win up to $25,000. These hotels are the Vegas we know.
The land of Lola and Wayne. Of Siegfried and Roy, Copperfield. |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response:
Showgirls in towering headdress. Sinatra’s sandbox. Most of them
built in the ’50s and ’60s, the era of mob chic and entertainmentcum -industry. Half-hour lines for taxis. Smoking not just allowed
but encouraged. Toupees and convention nametags and women in
furs of all hue. A museum that features the World’s Biggest Coke
Bottle. The Harley-Davidson Cafe, with its tympanum of huge protruding hawg; Bally’s H&C, with its row of phallic pillars all electrified and blinking in grand mal sync. A city that preten |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: ds to be
nothing but what it is, an enormous machine of exchange — of
spectacle for money, of sensation for money, of money for more
money, of pleasure for whatever be tomorrow’s abstract cost.
Nor let us forget Vegas’s synecdoche and beating heart. It’s kittycorner from Bally’s: Caesars Palace. The granddaddy. As big as 20
Wal-Marts end to end. Real marble and fake marble, carpeting you
can pass out on without contusion, 130,000 square feet of casino
alone. Domed ceilings, clerestories, barrel vaults. In C |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: aesars Palace
is America conceived as a new kind of Rome: conqueror of its own |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: 9 |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: D AV I D F O S T E R WA L L A C E |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: people. An empire of Self. It’s breathtaking. The winter’s light rain
makes all the neon bleed. The whole thing is almost too pretty to
stand. There could be no site but Las Vegas’s Caesars for modern
porn’s Awards show — here, the AAVNAs are one more spectacle.
Way more tourists and conventioneers recognize the starlets than
you’d expect. Double-takes all over the hotel. Even just standing
around or putting coins in a slot machine, the performers become
a prime attraction. Las Vegas doesn’t miss a trick.
T |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: he Annual AVN Awards are always scheduled to coincide with the
International Consumer Electronics Show (a.k.a. CES), which this
year runs from 8 through 11 January. The CES is a very big deal. It’s
like a combination convention and talent show for the best and
brightest in the world of consumer tech. Steve Forbes is here, and
DSS’s Thomson. Sun Microsystems is using this year’s CES to launch
its PersonalJava 1.0. Bill Gates gives a packed-house speech on Saturday morning. Major players from TV, cable, and m |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: erchandising
host a panel on the short-term viability of HDTV. A forum on the
problem of product returns by disgruntled customers seats 1,500
and is SRO. The CES as a whole is bigger than your correspondents’ hometowns. It’s spread out over four different hotels and
has 10,000+ booths with everything from “The First Ever Full Text
Message Pager in a Wristwatch” to the world’s premier self-heating
home satellite dish (“The Snow and Ice Solution!”).
But far and away the CES’s most popular venue, with total
at |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: tendance well over 100,000 every year, is what is called the Adult
Software5 exhibition, despite the fact that the CES itself treats the
Adult tradeshow kind of like the crazy relative in the family and
keeps it way out in what used to be the parking garage of the Sands
hotel. This facility, a serious bus ride from all the other CES sites, is
5 Yes: “Software” is a funny misnomer here. It’s going to be a constant temptation to keep |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: winking and nudging and saying “no pun intended” or “as it were” after every possible
off-color entendre, of which there are so many at the AAVNAs that yr. corresps. have
decided to try to leave most of them to the reader’s discretion as matters of personal
choice and taste. |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: 10 |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: BIG RED SON |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: an enormous windowless all-cement space that during show hours
manages to induce both agoraphobia and claustrophobia. A big
sign says you have to be 21 to get in. The median age inside is 45,
almost all males, nearly everyone wearing some sort of conventioneer’s nametag. Every production company in the adult industry,
from Anabolic to Zane, has a booth here. The really big companies
have booths that are sprawling and multidisplay and more like
small strip malls. A lot of porn’s top female performers are con |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: tract
players, exclusive vendors to one particular production company;
and one reason why a lot of the starlets seem kind of tired and
cranky by Saturday night’s Awards gala is that they will have spent
much of the previous 72 hours at their companies’ CES booths, on
their feet all day in vertiginous heels, signing autographs and posing for pictures and pressing all manner of flesh.
The best way to describe the sonic environment at the ’98 CES is:
Imagine that the apocalypse took the form of a cocktail part |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: y. Male
fans move through the fractal maze of booths in groups of three or
more. Their expressions tend to be those of junior-high boys at a
peephole, an expression that looks pretty surreal on a face with jowls
and no hairline. Some among them are video retailers; most are not.
Most are just hard-core fans, the industry’s breath and bread. A lot of
them not only recognize but seem to know the names, stage names,
and curricula vitae of almost all the female performers.
It takes an average of two hours and t |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: welve minutes to traverse
the Adult CES expo, counting an average of four delays for getting
lost after a chicane turn or some baroque ceiling-high cheval glass
designed to double the visual exposure of Heatwave Video’s display
for Texas Dildo Masquerade gets you all turned around. Your correspondents are accompanied by Harold Hecuba and Dick Filth, who
have very generously offered to act as guides and docents, and here
is a random spatter of the things we see the first time we come in:
A second-tier Arrow |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: Video starlet in a G-string poses for a
photo, forked dorsally over the knee of a morbidly obese cellphone
retailer from suburban Philadelphia. The guy taking the picture, |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: 11 |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: D AV I D F O S T E R WA L L A C E |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: whose CES nametag says Hi and that his name is Sherm, addresses
the starlet as “babe” and asks her to readjust so as to “give us a little
more bush down there.” An Elegant Angel starlet with polyresin
wings attached to her back is eating a Milky Way bar while she signs
video boxes. Actor Steven St. Croix is standing near the Caballero
Home Video booth, saying to no one in particular “Let me out
of here, I can’t wait to get out of here.”6 Adult-video stores all have
a distinctive smell — a mix of cheap magne |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: tic tape and disinfectant — and the Sands’ former parking garage is rank with it. Asian
businessmen move through the aisles in dense graceful packs and
are assiduously cheery and polite. A young guy in a full-color
Frankenstein T-shirt is spraypainting cartoon flames on an actress’s
breasts at the Sin City booth. The actress — an obscure one, not
even Filth and Hecuba know her name — has normal-size breasts,
and there’s not much of an audience. Producer/director Max
Hardcore draws a way bigger crowd at the |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: MAXWORLD booth,
where one of his girls is squatting on the countertop masturbating
with the butt of a riding crop. Max’s videos’ promotional posters
have him carrying a girl in minishorts over his shoulder against the
backdrop of various city skylines; the pitches at the bottom say
“see pretty girls sodomized in manners most foul! see cumsplattered girls too stupid to know better!” Max is a story all
to himself, according to Harold Hecuba. D. Filth and a porn executive dressed entirely in Campbell Nightwatc |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: h plaid are smoking
cigars and keep holding their cigars up together and comparing
the ash to see which one has the cleanest burn. A lot of the industry
males and even some of the starlets are also smoking cigars. 1998
is definitely the Year of the Cigar. The starlets are all in either extremely formal cocktail dresses or else abbreviated latex/vinyl/
Lycra ensembles. Heels are uniformly sharp and ultrahigh. Some
of the starlets are so heavily made up they look embalmed. They |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: 6 St. Croix’s background is that he apprenticed as a mason but then couldn’t get union |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: work. He’s got great dark satanic-looking eyebrows and has won several AVN Awards. |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: 12 |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: BIG RED SON |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: tend to have complexly coiffed hair that looks really good from 20
feet away but on closer inspection is dry and dead. Someone who is
either sometime-performer Jeff Marton or “Bizarro-Sleaze” filmmaker Gregory Dark is doing sleight-of-hand tricks with his trademark fedora.7 Whoever he is, he has a goatee. Harold Hecuba also
has a goatee; Dick Filth has more like a soul patch. H.H. and D.F.,
longtime industry journalists, know everybody here and keep getting stopped and drawn into conversations. (These delay |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: s, during
which yr. corresps. sort of stand there awkwardly at the edge of the
conversation and try to look around as if they too know people
here and are waiting only to spot them in the crowd before they go
off and get into their own involved conversations, have not been included in the 132-minute Adult CES–traversal average.) This year,
a good 75 percent of the males in and around the porn industry
appear to be sporting variants of the goatee.8
Next to the Outlaw Video booth, a starlet in a gold lamé
spa |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: ghetti-strap gown, chewing gum and blowing large blue bubbles,
is being videotaped by a disabled fan whose camera and parabolic
mike are bolted to the arm of his wheelchair; the starlet is pointing
to the tattoos on her left arm and appears to be explaining the
origin and context of each one. At the Vivid Video multibooth
complex,9 Ms. Taylor Hayes has what is probably the longest
autograph-and-flesh-press line in the entire Sands garage. Taylor is
major-league pretty — she looks like a slightly debauched C |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: indy
Crawford — and an oversize monitor suspended from the ceiling
over the Vivid area plays clips of her scantily clad and dancing amid
dry-ice fumes. There’s a berm of boxed videos on the floor by the
counter and a huge man with a visor and handheld credit card
machine on Taylor’s right flank as she greets each fan like a long7 (meaning both men habitually wear fedoras)
8 Dick Filth reports that a couple years ago the big industry trend was Heavy Metal and |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: that everyone at the Adult CES had very long hair and wore black tanktops and iron
crosses, etc.
9 Vivid is one of the industry’s great powers, a company famous for having billboards that
sometimes cause traffic accidents in downtown LA. |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: 13 |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: D AV I D F O S T E R WA L L A C E |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: lost relative. According to Dick Filth, Taylor is both a genuinely
nice person and a consummate pro.
The booth for XPlor Media — a company known for its
“Southern Belles” video series and orgy for world peace
Website — is arresting because all the execs at XPlor seem to be
under 25 and the booth’s atmosphere is that of a fraternity party in
its third straight day. One young bald guy is unconscious in a fetal
position on the counter, and some wag has glued all sorts of feathers and flaccid plastic two-headed |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: dildoish things to his skull.
XPlor’s owner-auteurs are two brothers, trust-fund babies from a
Connecticut suburb of NYC. Their names are Farrel and Moffitt
Timlake. Farrel, who wears twelve-hole Doc Martens and cargo
pants and what’s either a very light parka or very heavy sweatshirt
with a hood that stays up at all times, is a particular cause célèbre at
the ’98 CES because he’s apparently a friend of the two guys who
do South Park, and these guys are rumored to be in Vegas and to
possess tickets to Satu |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: rday’s Awards banquet.10
10 Here, if you’re interested, is D. Filth’s out-loud on-site peripatetic expansion re the |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: camaraderie between XPlor and South Park:
XPlor is a kind of an anomaly type of thing in the porn business. By and large the
industry is still run by these dim grim cigar-smoking numbnutses who’ll just stare
blankly at you if you should ever even like attempt a bonmot [pronounced as one
consonant-intensive word] or whatnot. You get me? In contrast to how XPlor are
more of your hippieish dope-smoking bunch of Gen Xers who are always up for a
good gag. Like, after Trey [Parker, the Groening-type figure behind |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: South Park] and
Farrel [Timlake] became pals [via Parker’s hanging out at XPlor to do research for
his and Matt (Stone, Parker’s partner on South Park)’s Orgazmo, an upcoming movie
about which your correspondents know nothing], XPlor was doing a video shoot at
Buck Henry’s place [?!? Explanatory details unavailable — everyone simply acts as
though Buck Henry’s place being available for hard-core porn shoots were a matter
of wide and public knowledge]. Richard Dreyfuss and I think Carrie Fisher also
were at |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: the shoot [?!? But no kidding, according to Filth, who yr. corresps. rather
hope has a good attorney], and, as a goof, Trey and Farrel decide to switch identities, get it? So Trey pretends to direct, doing it in like big drama-queen persona —
“I want more ASS shots, goddammit!” type of thing — while Farrel hung back and pretended to take notes. Get it? Then later at one point Trey orders Farrel, as Trey, to
perform — because, oh, Farrel performs sometimes too, under the name Tim
Lake, Tim Lake, get it? — a |
### Instruction: Write in the style of### Input: DFW### Response: nd Farrel does, did, puts down the notebook and phone
and dis, like, robes and dives right in, which you can understand this completely
freaks out the assembled legit showbiz types [!?], like, they’re like “I can’t believe
the guy from South Park is having sex in front of a camera!” Then at one point Trey
gives the video rig to Carrie Fisher [?!] and tells her to try and do the close-ups as
they’re getting close to money [see below for defs. of industry jargon]. Get me?
What a couple of yucks. [End of expan |
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